Hey forum,
So i constantly play stick empires and it seems my achilles heel is giant spammers. any suggestions and/or statgies on how to counter? keep in mind a giant spammer is pretty much a miner-spammer, but the guys i face put up tacticle defenses that i cant really damage before they have at least 1 giant.
Thanks, WiredMoose

it takes time to build up a big groups of giants, if you see a giant hoard being built up at the tower for example, what I do is build a mix of spears and swords - you'll get a lot more than he has giants - then rush his statue. He'll stun and kill a few of your group (1 per giant he has) but the rest will get through and be on his statue and miners before his giants can come and defend, being big and slow, you knock his statue down. If it works first time, game over. If you dont have enough surviving units to destroy his statue, you kill some miners and supress his economy and damage some of his statue. While he rebuilds miners and continutes to build giants, you build more swords and spears and repeat, against a weakened statue.
Consider garisoning while you build up troops, so he cant see what you are building too. leave out front a meric or two and enough of units to kill the tower spawn - then he will not be expecting a rush.

Or
build units to fight his giants.
there are several ways to do that, but probably need better players to advise you.
eg a wizard with electric wall and poision - keep him behind a meat shield or two miner-wall.
Try two wizards behind a wall (miner wall or meat shield). As he beats on your miners walls, sit him in an electric wall, and poison spray him.
coupled with
a group of ninja with max upgrade do some serious damage to giant then flee or fight.

When he retreats from the above, charge him with your faster units, as he's slow and can only run or fight - focus fire on the giant with weakest life, if you kill one, it sets him back a lot, if you wound it, he will heal (takes time even with heal from meric to fully heal a giant) and still be delayed while you build up forces/defense.

focus fire on one gaint, small units can stay on one target, while giants rocks will only hit which ever giant is infront and cant target a weakened foe. Use this to your advantage - if you have 2 or more giants keep a healthy one in front as shield, while using other units to take down the weakest giant.

If your building up, and cant take down a giant yet, try take out (eg ninja hit and run) his expensive units like a wizzard which will die easily and replacing it slows his giant building efforts.

Against chaos giants, use order giants, as they have range. Or use allbow's behind a meat shield as the chaos giant cant hit them - as long as you dont get close.
What fun it must be to kite a giant with a flock of albow's (I was the one with the chaos giants - hate the allbow kiting no good order player! (Joke))
He had about 10 albow, and could drop a chaos giant without taking a hit.
All I could use to counter was dead, but I didnt think of that at the time, and tried my own flying archers, but couldnt fund enough of them quick enough.

BTW, any more experienced player commenting on how to improve my tactics would be greatly apreciated.

Counter a nuisance with another nuisance.

Swordwrath with Rage.

Hi reader,

Easy. Just get a dumb army of Shadowraths, make him attack. Run past all his Giants with Shinobi. Hit their statue hard.

.:Invincitron:.

They will camp in their base with THREE castle archers (dealing giants with infantry tactic doesn't work anymore!!!!! Damn!!!!)
until they have SEVEN giants....
if you attack him with swordwrath, they will throw stones from the castle to you....
Your swordwrath cannot stay near his castle and you will never win it
You can never win it....
That is why giant spammers suck

Quote from Azxc

They will camp in their base with THREE castle archers (dealing giants with infantry tactic doesn't work anymore!!!!! Damn!!!!)
until they have SEVEN giants....
if you attack him with swordwrath, they will throw stones from the castle to you....
Your swordwrath cannot stay near his castle and you will never win it
You can never win it....
That is why giant spammers suck

No one ask you to only use Swordwrath...

Uberman, this is a great strategy, but a problem is if they have a giant(s) at their statue or/and Castle Archers. But it is a good strategy, I played againts someone who did this. He was begging me to let him rebuild, so i pulled my giants away from his statue, and he sent out 15 speartons to my statue. lol - NO MERCY -.-

Quote from KrayZStick

Uberman, this is a great strategy, but a problem is if they have a giant(s) at their statue or/and Castle Archers. But it is a good strategy, I played againts someone who did this. He was begging me to let him rebuild, so i pulled my giants away from his statue, and he sent out 15 speartons to my statue. lol - NO MERCY -.-

AW, shucks :o
Even if he has a giant at the statue, I'd normally ignore it - there are only so many units it can kill in the time it takes you to drop his statue - Be sure to manually target all your units on his statue though, as they will tend to auto-target miners or combat units.

Edit to add

Hey KrayZstick you just beat my huge army of knights by giants :) so maybe the theory wasnt put in place well :)
It was an epic struggle, and next time we'll see

massing giants isnt even a legitimate strategy...its just a strategy for when u want to lose rating

way better to have an actual army

Quote from badplayer

massing giants isnt even a legitimate strategy...its just a strategy for when u want to lose rating

way better to have an actual army

Even though its the way of the noobie player, it still does take some beating at the lower end of the rankings.
If you have any good ways, share, because at the sub-1500 rankings its a winning way often - if we can share methods, it may help make giant-wars a thing of the past.
Without help, a lot of lower ranks can onlt counter giant-massers by massing giants. :( sad but true.

As a chaos player, you cant do giants to counter giants, because X order giants easily beats the same number of chaos giants, due to having a range attack. (where X is a number between 1 and 11).

So what is the best way to counter giants, once he has them up?
The best way being to prevent him getting them up, but lets assume he's got them.


(particularly for chaos, but also as order)

Yesterday, I had a giant spammer beat my non-giants, and in chat he described himself as a pro!
He did have one valid point, that a giant is the best use of 7 population.
Saddly I think he was right on that.
He said 11 giants and a meric is the ultimate army :)

lol k well giants is easily not the best army...i can think of many ways to just crush giant massers

btw i play order

my strategies vary a lot depending on what the opponent does earlier on, but the general place u want to be in is:

strategy 1, eco push (this is viable because ur opponent was dumb enough to choose giants and wont be able to stop it, even if they turtle/ur eco will be better because giants suck)

beating giants is possible with just about any kind of push as long as the army composition is even half good

3 miners on mana
10 miners on gold
get archer arrow upgrade
get miner hustle, obviously, especially since this relies a lot on gold
attempt to sneak in the extra income upgrades, not necessary but itll help if the 4 gold mines manage to get emptied
once this is done, there is no more need to look at ur base because they wont be able to attack it
keep massing medics, archers, and speartons (or swordwraths if broke somehow) in that priority (speartons have top priority if u only have 1 of them on the field)
dont queue units, thats a noob method and u might lose
keep pressing the attack arrow
just move ur units smartly and u should have no problem destroying all their giants/destroying their statue

remember to use fire arrow occasionally. probably not even necessary

even works on big maps like green hill that take forever for ur units to get to his statue

they wont be able to have any significant attack early on because ull have units out faster than he will (or else he wouldnt be massing giants...)
notice this really only works BECAUSE he is massing giants. in reality, this army composition is pretty poor and is more of a sacrifice-all-the-units strategy rather than a playing-smart strategy, but it works against giant massers

dont even worry if hes a noob and hides his weak giants behind the other ones, it doesnt even matter because his army is crap. just keep massing the crap out of him and destroy his giants/statue depending on situation

anyway, reasons i say mass giants is such a weak strategy:
u sacrifice having an actual army for a few better units
they are not the best use of 7 supply (really, theyre not. an actual army is a better use of supply)
it takes forever just to build one of them (mass time is too long and not viable if u want to keep ur rating)
even if they have 5 giants, a medic, and the tower, u can still easily win (ive done it before, barely dropped below 70 supply. remassed in less than a minute, unlike him who got his army destroyed and never recovered) i then proceeded to sacrifice all my miners and win the game

looking at it a different way:
in the time it takes to make a giant, u can make like 5 other units and have spare time. obviously, the 5 units will be better than the 1 giant. mass giants is easily outmassed, and u can get better eco than him to do it because he cant attack

tl;dr or tecness:
mass giants can easily be economically cheesed/economically all in'd

please expand upon the section;

keep pressing the attack arrow
just move ur units smartly and u should have no problem destroying all their giants/destroying their statue

If you just keep pressing attack button, your units keep going in 1 by 1 and will be easily killed by his ranged attack before reaching his giants, unless there is an ongoing battle in which case its a constant stream of reinforcements - which is what I think you describe.
So do you mean build a force, attack, keep building and adding to reinforcements with attack button
If your getting too few fighting units pull back and rebuild the force
repeat.


Aslo, I assume your 'moving smartly' means focus melee troops on one giant and kill it, even if he pulls it back form the front line (which is much harder with range giants who can just hit the front giant).

So it would be;
group up
attack a giant
keep adding reinforcements
focus fire on one till it dies
reteat to regroup if need be, but ideally keep pushing and focus on second giant.

Last question;
If he has say some healers, I assume you take them out first?
However, these are quick and easy for him to replace, and as mana isnt needed to heal its an infinite supply of healing.
Which kind of means your strategy 1 (based on a slow build time for giants) isnt going to be as effective if you focus on killing the healers first.
But if you dont kill them, his giants are much harder to kill

So do you split the force? some units on a giant while others kill the healers?

How do you suggest to best apply the strategy to a group of just giants and a few merics? Specifically, which targets to kill first.

Thanks for the great strategy BTW, i am not being critical, I just want to know how you suggest to best do it - for me and anyother player who gets giant spammed in game after game - We're trying to learn advanced game skills, but its a long hard road without a few guiding signposts along the route :)

its not my preferred strategy against giant massers, but it should work
basically, if u dont think u can defeat his current army with what u have, move back and reinforce a bit more. stockpiling the archers behind the meatshield units is fairly important, dont let the archers get killed if the meatshields die, just move back and reinforce a bit before attacking again. shouldnt be too hard because archers outrange everything

and when i say move back/reinforce, i dont mean go all the way back to ur statue, i mean go out of his range

if for some reason u cant break his outer 4 gold mines (break whatever he has near his outer 4 gold mines), then u should probably switch to a stronger strategy

Quote from badplayer

its not my preferred strategy against giant massers, but

What is your prefered strategy?
What about chaos? any ideas?

Thnx